[jbosstools-dev] Eclipse plugins testing structure

[Mickael Istria]

On 01/27/2016 10:28 AM, Aurelien Pupier wrote:
> Hi,
Hi Aurelien!
> Did I misunderstood something?
> Are there counterpoints to use fragments and maven-surefire-plugin?
> Are there other examples which are matching more closely to my usecase
> in jboss tools codebase?
About using fragments, the only drawback I'm aware of is that one cannot 
add a dependency to a fragment from their plugin. So it's not possible 
for other tests to reuse some logic that is inside a fragment. In the 
spirit of "treating tests as 1st class citizen", I believe it's 
generally better to allow composition of test bundles and to make them 
regular bundles.

About maven-surefire (plain Java) vs tycho-surefire (OSGi/Eclipse), so 
far, we do not test the code of JBoss Tools outside of the "Eclipse" 
context. We can debate about the meaning of "unit tests", but what you 
see can be seen as "unit tests running in integration context". Our 
experience with some other parts of JBoss Tools have been that the 
difference of behavior between inside or outside of Eclipse can be 
important. So our policy has been so far to test everything with 
tycho-surefire-plugin to make sure what we're testing isn't too far from 
what will actually happen in production.
The QE people could tell you their opinion on what's more important 
between fast tests, and longer tests that are closer from production.
I guess it all depends, as always: we could imagine the unit test 
running in plain Java to verify only their logic, but it shouldn't 
become a replacement to some integration test to verify that the logic 
also works in the right context.
I would say that as long as Eclipse is the *only* deployment context for 
a piece of code, then starting unit tests inside Eclipse is fine. Also, 
for fast unit tests, then they are neglictable compared to starting up 
the OSGi Platform. So if we want to start an OSGi platform anyway for 
integration tests, it seems simpler to run those tests inside that Platform.

HTH
-- 
Mickael Istria
Eclipse developer at JBoss, by Red Hat <http://www.jboss.org/tools>
My blog <http://mickaelistria.wordpress.com> - My Tweets 
<http://twitter.com/mickaelistria>
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